Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth makes essentially this argument: measured TFP growth from ~1920–1970 dwarfs anything before or since, and the IT revolution produced only a brief blip (1995–2004) before reverting to stagnation.
The "Great Inventions" that actually moved TFP:
- Electrification — but the gains came decades after the bulb. Paul David's "dynamo" paper showed factories needed to be physically rebuilt around unit drive (each machine its own motor) before TFP exploded in the 1920s.
- Internal combustion — automobiles, trucks, and especially tractors (which collapsed agricultural labor share).
- Chemical engineering — Haber-Bosch fertilizer alone is responsible for a large fraction of humans alive today; also petrochemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals.
- Public health infrastructure — clean water, sewers, and later antibiotics. Mokyr emphasizes these.
- Containerization — Levinson's The Box: ocean freight costs fell ~90%, enabling the entire globalized supply chain.
- Mass production techniques — Fordism, interchangeable parts, scientific management. Process innovation, not product innovation.
- Air conditioning — made the US South economically viable and shifted population/industry.
- Jet aviation — collapsed the cost of moving people and high-value freight globally.
The pattern Gordon emphasizes: these were one-time transformations of the physical economy (how you grow food, move goods, stay alive, light a room). The internet mostly transformed information and entertainment — sectors that are a small share of measured output. Hence Krugman's quip aging better than people admit.